Think about that for a moment. “Turn it back off and turn it back on,” is a time-honored diagnostic tool for a reason. Errors that come back again aren’t random errors, in many cases. And while four missiles still aren’t dozens, they aren’t a single launch, either. If Petrov waited for radar confirmation, the missiles would be just minutes away from their targets. The entire Soviet nuclear doctrine furthermore rested on the idea that the
computers are infallible and must be obeyed.
There was no room in the official Soviet training manual for Petrov to do what he did next. The manual said that his overriding responsibility was to pick up the phone and inform his superiors that a launch had occurred. The computer system was signaling the highest level of probability that a launch had actually taken place.

“There was no rule about how long we were allowed to think before we reported a strike,” he continued. “But we knew that every second of procrastination took away valuable time; that the Soviet Union’s military and political leadership needed to be informed without delay.

“All I had to do was to reach for the phone; to raise the direct line to our top commanders – but I couldn’t move,” Petrov had said. “I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan.”

So what did Petrov do? He picked up the phone and called in a system malfunction — a malfunction he wasn’t honestly sure existed, even at the time. In the long run, it turned out the error was caused by a rare alignment issue between the satellites in question and the sun’s reflection on high-altitude clouds. The entire incident was hushed up until after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Next week marks the 34th anniversary of the day when the world’s survival all hung on the actions of a single man. While it’s impossible to know if Yuri Andropov would have ordered a launch on Petrov’s report, there’s every chance he would’ve. Multiple prominent Soviet scientists had praised the early warning satellite system as foolproof. Given these developments, we ran a very real risk of reading about these events on fragmented terminal entries several hundred years from now, once radiation levels went down and the Capital Wasteland was able to mount an expedition to Russia to…

Sorry. Got a little Fallout crossed in there.

Jokes aside, September 26, 1983 may have been the closest the world ever came to a no-holds-barred nuclear war. There is little doubt about what the American response to a genuine Soviet launch would have been. Thanks to Stanislav Petrov, it didn’t happen.

One of the main reasons why people don’t achieve their goals is because they lack the motivation to either get started, or to keep going once the going gets tough.

Luckily, there are many different strategies you can use in order to motivate yourself to work toward the achievement of you goals. Here are 21 ways to keep your motivation flying high:

1.
Make sure that the goal is your own
. Nothing will drain your energy as much as trying to go after a goal that someone else has set for you and which you don’t believe in. Think of the difference between the effort that you have to make in order to walk uphill, compared to the effort that you have to make in order to walk downhill.

Make sure that the goal is your own

2.
Use affirmations
. Usually, I’m not a fan of affirmations. Telling yourself things such as, “I am now a millionaire”– when the truth is that your net worth is in the negative digits–, is not helpful in any way. However, affirmations such as the following are useful:

Use affirmations

3.
Engage in what you like best
. As Charles M. Schwab once put it: “A man can succeed at almost anything for which he has unlimited enthusiasm.”

Engage in what you like best

Napoleon Hill—author of the perennial best seller, “Think and Grow Rich”–explains that enthusiasm is easily expressed when one is inspired by a burning desire for something. Therefore, you need to set goals that you’re enthusiastic about. Think of enthusiasm as the flame that keeps your motivation burning.

4.
Surround yourself with people who are enthusiastic.
Other people can either dampen your enthusiasm and your motivation, or they can help you to keep your motivation high. Befriend people who will encourage you and challenge you to achieve your goals.

Surround yourself with people who are enthusiastic.

In addition, enthusiasm is contagious. When you’re around people who are enthusiastic about their lives and about their goals, their enthusiasm will rub off on you.

If you can’t find people who are enthusiastic, surround yourself with videos and audio programs of people who are enthusiastic, such as Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins, Earl Nightingale, Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar, Denis Waitley, and Marelisa Fábrega (he, he he ).

We proceeded to investigate the estimated parameters of this winning model. The modulation by dopamine of the VIM>VIM self-connection as estimated by DCM (i.e. Ep.B parameter) is a scaling parameter of the fixed connection strength (i.e. Ep.A parameter) where a value >1 indicates an increase of the inhibitory self-connection strength (
Zeidman, 2015
). A one-sample
t
-test showed that this scaling parameter was not significantly different from 1 across the whole group [
t
(14); mean = 1.002, SD = 0.013,
P =
0.48], indicating no significant modulatory effect of dopamine on the self-connection. This is perhaps at first surprising, because this model clearly outperformed a null-model with no modulatory effect of dopamine. However, this finding emphasizes the power of Bayesian model comparison: the combination of the absence of a significant directional effect at the parameter level across the group in context of positive model evidence indicates that this parameter is highly variable across individuals, yet meaningful. Indeed, we observed a significant relationship between the dopaminergic modulation of the inhibitory VIM self-connection (Ep.B) and the clinical dopamine response of resting tremor (R = 0.56,
P =
0.03;
Fig. 4
A). This indicates that dopamine increased the inhibitory VIM self-coupling most in patients with clinically more dopamine-responsive tremor.

Brain–behaviour relationship.
Figure displaying the correlation between the dopaminergic modulation of the inhibitory VIM self-connection (Ep.B) as estimated by DCM and the clinical dopamine responsiveness of resting tremor (
A
), bradykinesia (
B
), and rigidity (
C
) based on UPDRS differences score (OFF minus ON). Only dopamine responsiveness of tremor was significantly correlated with the Ep.B parameter, even when controlling for the dopamine responsiveness of the other two symptoms (partial correlation, R = 0.56, 0.046). *Significant effect.

Brain–behaviour relationship.
Figure displaying the correlation between the dopaminergic modulation of the inhibitory VIM self-connection (Ep.B) as estimated by DCM and the clinical dopamine responsiveness of resting tremor (
A
), bradykinesia (
B
), and rigidity (
C
) based on UPDRS differences score (OFF minus ON). Only dopamine responsiveness of tremor was significantly correlated with the Ep.B parameter, even when controlling for the dopamine responsiveness of the other two symptoms (partial correlation, R = 0.56, 0.046). *Significant effect.

Next, we tested whether this brain-behaviour relationship was specific for tremor. There were no correlations between the dopaminergic modulation of the inhibitory VIM self-connection (Ep.B) and the clinical dopamine response of bradykinesia (R = 0.06,
P =
0.83;
Fig. 4
B) or rigidity (R = 0.42,
P =
0.11;
Fig. 4
C). Furthermore, when we calculated partial correlations between each clinical symptom and dopaminergic modulation of the inhibitory VIM self-connection (Ep.B)—while controlling for the other two symptoms—we found a significant partial correlation only for resting tremor (R = 0.56,
P =
0.046), but not for bradykinesia or rigidity.

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